Revolting Bodies: Aesthetics, Representation, and Popular Culture

Our understanding of ourselves and others are formed by visual images and bodily feelings that are social in origin. They make us feel (un)comfortable, sublime, ridiculous, grotesque. In this course we will examine how the materiality of the body grounds our metaphors about identity and subject formation. This course moves between cultural studies, queer theory, disability studies, science fiction, drama and film asking how representations structure they way we "know" and "see" bodies. Ultimately we will explore how revolting bodies--bodies that disgust, repulse, signal their difference--can become bodies in revolt--bodies that resist and imagine new possibilities.